Workflow object definitions that can and should be customized to meet a certain consumer's needs.

Workflow object definitions protected against customization because they represent standards that may also be upgraded in the future by the provider.

For example, the Oracle Workflow development team is a provider of seed data called the Standard item type. The Standard item type contains standard activities that can be dropped into any custom workflow process. The development team at your organization's headquarters may create a custom workflow process definition that references activities from the Standard item type. This makes the headquarters team a consumer of the Standard item type seed data.

Now suppose the headquarters team wants to deploy the custom workflow definition that it created to teams at other regional offices. The headquarters team, as seed data providers, may want to do the following:

Identify certain workflow objects in its custom workflow definition as corporate standards that the regional teams should adhere to and not modify.

Designate certain objects in its deployed process as customizable for the regional offices to alter to their offices' needs.

The headquarters team can satisfy both requirement using the access protection feature in Oracle Workflow. Access protection lets seed data providers protect certain data as 'read-only', while allowing other data to be customized. Also during a seed data upgrade, access protection lets the seed data provider overwrite any existing protected seed data with new versions of that seed data, while preserving any customizations made to customizable seed data.

Oracle Workflow assigns a protection and customization level to every workflow object definition stored in the database and requires every user of Oracle Workflow to operate at a certain access level. The combination of protection, customization, and access levels makes up the access protection feature and determines whether a user can modify a given workflow object. The level, in all three cases, is a numeric value ranging from 0 to 1000 that indicates the relationship between different organizations as providers and consumers of seed data.

The following range of levels are presumed by Oracle Workflow:

0-9

Oracle Workflow

10-19

Oracle Application Object Library

20-99

Oracle Applications development

100-999

Customer organization. You can determine how you want this range to be interpreted. For example, 100 can represent headquarters, while 101 can represent a regional office, and so on.